


Senses

by readbetweenthelions



Category: Marvel Avengers Movies Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-18
Updated: 2012-08-18
Packaged: 2017-11-12 09:53:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,868
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/489570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/readbetweenthelions/pseuds/readbetweenthelions
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Well, I hope you enjoyed it! The theme, obviously, was the senses. Each of the Avengers had their own "patron" sense, if you will. (Bruce - smell, Natasha - hearing, Steve - time (yes, it's a sense, there <i>are</i> more than 5), SHIELD - proprioception, Clint - sight, Thor - taste, and Tony - touch. If you want to get really into it, you could say the Avengers as a team are nociception, or the sense of pain.)</p></blockquote>





	Senses

Most people already know me, or think they do. I’m Bruce Banner, the famous, Incredible Hulk. The lab experiment gone wrong. The kettle of seething rage that could boil over into a big green mess of destruction at any moment.

But the Hulk isn’t me. He’s a part of me, but he’s not Bruce Banner. I am mild-mannered. I am quiet but not shy, witty but not ostentatious, intelligent (some would say and have said a genius) but not outspoken. It’s my job to protect the world from the Hulk, and I accomplish my job by trying to stay out of trouble. That means not picking fights, not responding to taunts, and it means humor. If I can’t joke about it, then it becomes too much pressure, and the Other Guy doesn’t like pressure.

I am not super strong like Steve, or ultra-confident like Tony. I’m not a skilled assassin like Natasha or Clint. I can’t command forces of nature like Thor, and I don’t have any special weapons. I just have my emotions, my anger, and the other side of me who comes out either when I can no longer control him or when I need him to help me protect the world from something that (for once) isn’t him. In fact, the thing that’s most incredible about me is my self-control. It’s a Herculean effort. And my teammates know I’m always straining, but they’ve lost most of that fear they had in the beginning, the fear that everyone else who knows what I am has washing off them in waves.

Another thing about me – I’ve always had a fantastic sense of smell. It’s how I know people. I can smell a person, whether they smell good, bad, or neutral, from across the room, and my brain keeps a catalog of the scents, like a directory of the people in my life.

It doesn’t even take an audible sniff – simply a natural inhalation of breath. I’d tried to explain this to people before the accident, but after the accident I rarely talked to people in a context where the topic would come up in conversation. I used to describe it this way: Everyone knows each person’s house smells different. It’s readily apparent when you walk in. It’s a combination of everything – their laundry detergent, the soap and shampoo they use, what they cooked for dinner or for breakfast, the pile of dirty clothes they may or may not have, if they smoke, if they have pets, everything that could possibly have a scent, it all blends together and it smells like them. In the same way, each single person smells different. It’s all a product of their soap and their shampoo and their laundry detergent and how active they are and how often they brush their teeth and what they eat and what they drink and the perfume or cologne and deodorant they wear and the way their skin just naturally smells. It’s unique, like a serial number, and the way a person smells says a lot of things about a person.

This story isn’t really about me. It’s about us. The Avengers, as they’re so fond of calling us. And I want to tell it to you through my eyes - or, if you will, my nose.

***

Of all the Avengers, I met Natasha Romanoff first, in a shack in Kolkata that smelled of old meals and mold and the meat cooking a small family was cooking on a fire outside. The little girl that had led me there smelled like most poor children, a little sour and a little dirty but under that a sweetness that most children carry – her scent lingered a little on the air. Distracted as I was by the girl’s sudden departure, I didn’t notice Natasha Romanoff until it was too late.

Natasha is curious. She was then and is now a person who tries – and tries hard – not to smell like anything, and I know this because I’m the same way. Try as she might, though, Natasha does have a scent – a faint sugar sweetness and a citrusy overtone. That evening she had the smell of Indian spices on her breath, and in that shack in Kolkata I could smell her lipstick and the new leather of her outfit and faintly the fruity, soapy smell of her shampoo overlaid with a slight singed smell, probably due to the heat of a hairdryer.

I knew she wanted something; that much was very clear. However, I also knew she wasn’t planning on (in her own words) “persuading” me, as she later put it, via seduction – she would have worn perfume or pheromones or something of that nature, but I detected none of that. She is smart, to try and hide her scent – she’s a spy, and she knows as well as I do that if someone can smell you coming then all the stealth and trickery in the world can’t keep them from discovering you before you want them to.

It’s a myth that you can smell fear. Dogs can’t, bears can’t, big cats can’t, and it’s because fear isn’t a scent – it’s body language, it’s energy. It’s easy enough to sense, especially when it becomes the reality of every human interaction with someone who knows that you’re really a monster. And when I yelled at Natasha in that quiet, dingy shack, I could sense fear from her in waves. Natasha Romanoff, in control of everything at all times, tries hard not to be afraid but every single second she is. She’s afraid of her past, she’s afraid of her future, she’s afraid of loving Clint and losing Clint and dying and being hurt and a thousand little things that she will never let show, but I understand this about her because fear has become an integral part of me and it is easy to recognize a kindred spirit.

The one time I was allowed into Natasha’s quarters, tucked away in a quiet, dark corner of a hall two floors down from my lab and my apartment, they smelled surprisingly girlish. You get used to Business Natasha, to the swift and efficient spy, to the quick assassin with the scowl and the confidence and you forget that Natasha is, under all of it, a woman. She keeps her room like a secret, a den that smells of sandalwood and vanilla and fruit, all softness and darkness and femininity, because she has spent a lifetime in what is generally considered to be a man’s world and she isn’t about to shatter her reputation with all this touchy-feely crap.

Natasha Romanoff is a hard ally to win, but once you succeed, she is the most constant of friends. She has something I really like in a person, which is that she demands answers about physical things – about the circumstances of an event, all the little details – but she never asks how it makes you feel or why you did something you did. It’s because she knows. It’s her talent, her skill, that she can read these things in you. She knows what it is to understand without words. She can hear the words you don’t say, the ones that you don’t want to say or can’t say or need to say. She can hear it in your voice and everything about you.

I apologized to Natasha about almost killing her in the bowels of the SHIELD helicarrier just once. I tried to, many times after that, but every time she silenced me.

“One apology was enough, Doctor Banner,” she said. “I don’t need to hear any more.”

I felt guilty for a long time, but Natasha Romanoff, as scared as she had been of me on our first meeting, was never afraid of the Hulk again. She got over it quicker than most people, especially considering most people never do get over it. I like Natasha a lot. She is a silent companion, which is sometimes what you need when you work all day with Tony Stark and his blaring music and buzzing tools and constant chatter. I take breaks from my work and cook dinner with Natasha, and we eat in silence and then we part ways again, often without a single word exchanged between us. We’re both listeners, and we know listening to silence is sometimes more informative than listening to words.

***

Steve Rogers has a straightforward scent. He’s old-fashioned in every way, which is of course to be expected considering how long he’d been frozen in ice, and he smells it. He doesn’t quite have the smell of old books, which is a scent most people recognize and it’s easy to put into words and have people understand, but that isn’t Steve. He smells almost like an antique store, which sounds cliché but is strangely and startlingly accurate. He smells like old fabric and aging wood and a little bit like dust, though for a long time the scent of the hospital SHIELD had kept him in clung loosely on him, though now it is long faded and replaced by the scent of his quarters in Stark Tower. And on top of it all he smells like new synthetic materials and faintly of sweat, though whether from nervousness or exercise I can never tell. Maybe it’s both.

The funny thing about Steve is that I hadn’t been able to smell him at all when we first met, with the wind whipping on the carrier and the spray of the ocean bleaching everything to salt. I could still smell Coulson with his vanilla and spices but Steve’s scent was and is more subtle, and it was that much more elusive in the bright sunlight and cold sea breezes.

The first time I really got a handle on Steve’s scent wasn’t on the bridge, with Fury and Hill and all the other agents and later Tony, but in the Wishbone after blocking out Tony’s scent. It’s a barely-layered thing, the way Steve smells, since it’s practically all undertones. The secret of Steve’s presence isn’t, like so much of Fury’s, in the scent, but all in the look – the muscles, the spangles, the nobility and the set of his jaw. It’s an understatement that you have to look for, but I am always looking.

Steve Rogers doesn’t like bullies. That day in the Wishbone, he fought with Tony because that’s what he saw. For a long time Steve was disappointed because Tony was nothing like Howard Stark had been. Steve didn’t like the way Tony teased me, though he’s now grown to understand it and it never bothers him anymore. But that’s the way Steve is. He was small, he was an underdog, he was trampled on and messed with and beaten, and he doesn’t like seeing it happen to others. It’s part of what makes him a hero, what made him the poster child of the American Military in his day and what makes him such an icon in today’s world.

Steve’s quarters smell, as one might expect, like man. They smell like bachelor, all unwashed clothes and leftover food smell and the air freshener he sprays over it all because no one goes into Steve’s rooms before he’s cleaned up. It’s how he was raised – to make the bed and arrange the pillows and to never ever be seen as uncleanly, and on top of it he’s got his soldier’s training that means everything is polished for inspection. It’s a strange dichotomy, in that he ought to have grown out of this by now, but he’s been sleeping for 70 years and the woman he loved is long dead and he never learned how to not be a bachelor and there isn’t anyone who he needs to clean up for now since we all share certain spaces in Stark Tower that aren’t each other’s rooms and he is still, even after all this time, too busy getting used to the world to find a girl to make his quarters presentable for.

Steve is a great man – it’s understandable why Doctor Schmidt chose him for the Supersoldier Serum. He’s noble and trustworthy and rather like a police dog once you think about it – well-trained and loyal and fierce when he needs to be, but under it all just a creature who gives affection freely and just needs a little in return. After he got settled in, really settled in, he asked Tony politely (the way he asks everything) if he wouldn’t mind if Steve brought home a dog. Of course, Tony agreed because Tony had given his teammates almost unlimited run of the Tower almost as soon as they’d moved in, and though Tony wouldn’t say it he had a soft spot for dogs, who were tactile in a way most people except for Tony weren’t. Steve named the hulking German shepherd Bucky and it was greatly intimidated by the sleek gray cat that Natasha and Clint watched over and which had been named Loki because I had once, on the helicarrier, referred to Thor’s brother as having a brain like a bagful of cats, and the name stuck with the cat, who liked nothing better than causing trouble. I’d been worried about Thor’s reaction to the cat taking his brother’s name, but Thor had laughed heartily and picked the cat (then just a small, slinky kitten with wiry fur and a penchant for biting) up in one hand and sat him on his shoulder. Bucky and Loki fight a little but every now and then you walk into one of the shared lounges to find the thin, trouble-making cat curled up atop the slumbering, snoring hound, both sound asleep, and you knew they’re friends under it all.

Bucky is Steve’s best friend, and they go on runs through the city, through the parks and streets and some days Steve takes one of Tony’s cars and drives somewhere with his dog and they hike for the whole day, disappearing before breakfast and reappearing only after sunset. Steve misses his life in the 40’s – he misses the human Bucky and Peggy and Colonel Phillips, and he misses the military life he can no longer lead since he has become so famous, and he misses the old streets and the old way of doing things and when TV was black and white and things were cheaper. But he adjusted quickly. Steve has a sense about a lot of things – just a gut feeling, a sort of precognition, though whether it’s from the Serum or just who he always was is never clear. He just knows some things, the way we know what’s right and wrong or what’s good and what isn’t. It just happens, and it’s as reliable as any of our five senses.

***

It was a funny thing, the way Agent Coulson smelled – like the starch in his suit and vanilla laundry detergent and cologne (Calvin Klein, probably), like hair cream and cinnamon toothpaste, but also strangely like metal and yellowing paper and apples. He smelled halfway like a businessman, and halfway like a man who had nothing better to do than watch over grandchildren while he read in his library. It was odd, this strangely old smell, and it belied him completely. Phil Coulson was ever the upright agent, responsible and almost motherly in his treatment of the Avengers. Under it all he smelled a little bit like dog, as if he had one at home that he hadn’t gotten to see in a long time. Coulson was constantly at Fury’s side, being his right-hand man, and he took on a little bit of Fury’s own aroma. It was the scent of a hero who didn’t want to be all that super. It was the scent of a man who did his duty and did what was right and let his actions speak for themselves.

I never got to know that scent too well, because Coulson fell away from us too soon. Agent Hill, who I see only on rare occasions and who smells of strawberries and blast residue, still carries the bloodstained Captain America cards in a pocket of her leather jumpsuit. They smell halfway like aging cardstock and ink, and halfway like Phil, with the metallic tang of dried blood pervading the whole thing.

Nick Fury – now there’s an interesting one. He smells strongly of old leather and new polyester and gunpowder and the garlic he’s eaten in his last meal and semi-expensive aftershave. It’s a powerful smell – not overpowering, but speaking of power, like everything else Director Fury does. It’s almost intimidating, though I stopped letting scents scare me a long time ago. There isn’t a word for Fury’s smell except manly – it is alpha male in a way that matches up with every external appearance of the man. He’s not a man I’m ever begging to go toe-to-toe with, though I am hardly begging that from anybody. Fury’s is a scent born of strength and power and a curious sort of wisdom, and it commands respect.

You know when Director Nick Fury enters a room, because the swish of that overcoat he wears everywhere blows the smell of him around a room. You would think Fury would try to cover the scent, like Clint and Natasha, but he is not a man for careful scrubbing and deodorizing sprays and unscented deodorants. The only excuse I can come up with for why a man as in control as Director Fury lets his scent run wild is that he doesn’t know that it is doing just that. Fury is a man who sticks out - nothing he does blends into the background, and he knows it.

SHIELD itself, as an organization, has a smell, too. It smells like bomb residue, like gunpowder, like paperwork printed on triplicate carbon copies and like people, like agents who show up to work every day and they’ve left their families and their lives behind. It smells like the kind of protection one might get from, say, having a pack of wolves to defend you – sure, they’re on your side now, but they could turn and overpower you at any moment. It was no wonder Tony chafed under their yoke, no wonder Steve stuck so rigidly to their orders, and no wonder Clint and Natasha were typically so silent and sullen. SHIELD is a specter, though it tries to be a protective one, and it restricts and intimidates even those it aims to protect and assimilate. But under it all, SHIELD is a good organization, and dedicated. It’s hard to get used to all their rules and regulations, but somehow, we’ve managed to work with it.

***

Clint Barton is, in some ways, rather like Natasha, in that he keeps much of his scent masked. Though it’s difficult to get a sense of Clint since he likes to keep at a distance (from everyone, it seems, but Natasha) since he, in his own words, “sees better from a distance,” I managed it, weeks after the battle with the Chitauri, when I walked into a room of Stark Tower to find Clint already lounging on a couch, appearing suddenly after weeks of helping SHIELD play cleanup.

Clint was a man who ought to have smelled strongly but did everything in his power to scrub it away. He smelled faintly of cold sweat, the sort of soft and not pungent smell of human skin that one got from focusing, from holding a position for far too long, for straining against something and making difficult decisions. Though he smelled of Irish Spring and Head & Shoulders, the bulk of Clint’s scent was deeply, essentially human. He just smelled of skin and hair and sweat and person, overlaid with leather and synthetic fabrics and something slightly sour.

Clint, like so many of the team, is damaged. He’s killed a lot of people, and not always bad ones, and not always for good reasons. He’s quiet a lot, and he usually only speaks when he has an opinion or a thought he considers especially important. He pours his heart into his work for SHIELD because if he didn’t he would have nothing. He puts most of his trust in Natasha, who is his constant companion when he seeks companionship, and he leaves the rest of his trust with Fury and with the rest of us and he seems like he becomes his work sometimes, but he doesn’t let it really take over who he is.

Under it all, Clint is fun. He shares a quality with Tony and I – he laughs to keep himself from crying or getting angry or giving up. He plays pranks and teases, and keeps us all on our toes. He has the attitude of a man who used to be the life of the party – and he still is, when Tony can convince him and the others to drink – but who has had to become serious, to take on responsibilities and make extremely difficult decisions. He has the air of a craftsman, a true artist, which comes from his astonishing marksmanship. It isn’t something organic, like Thor’s power, or something that was made, like Steve’s or Tony’s, and it isn’t circumstance, like my own abilities, but something he trained at with all of his energy. It’s something he has carved from a huge rough block into a smooth, detailed, elaborate, and enormously meaningful thing that he holds closer to him than anything else in the world.

He watches, and like Natasha, listens. Instead of hearing silences, though, Clint watches all the tiny movements you don’t know you’re making, and he reads them like an open book. He sees whole scenes by keeping himself distant, and it makes him wiser. From the vantage points he chooses he sees every side of a battle. You can always trust Clint, and Natasha as well, to know more than they’re letting on. Clint can see everything, from friendships to rivalries to tricks and it makes him a good friend and a deadly enemy. 

***

Thor is a different kettle of fish entirely. He smells strongly – almost overpoweringly so – but not in a bad way. If there was ever a textbook definition of musk, that’s Thor. He is man, all male with testosterone and pungency all over. He smells like spice and beer and static electricity, like fabric and leather and long journeys. There’s a strange sweetness to it all, like the scent of a produce stand with all the smells of the myriad fruits in varying stages of ripeness all rising to greet you at once. It’s comforting, it’s strong, like a father and a friend at once. It makes you trust him – it grabs you and pulls you close and embraces you like a beloved brother. It’s a miraculously kind smell, for the enormity of the man exuding it.

With Thor it’s all reckless abandon and hearty laughter and powerful nobility, and watching him – later, after the Bifrost had been repaired and Thor had come back to Earth to live with us and help us protect the realm he loves so much – is like watching a lion play with his cubs; he can be gentle but rough at the same time, good-natured, but there was always that threat lingering in his sinews that should a threat come to those he protects nothing would escape his bulk and his fury.

Thor’s favorite thing to do is to eat and to drink. He got a lot of it in Asgard – it’s how he was raised, and it’s how he remains. He likes to eat every Midgardian food he can find, and we’ve yet to discover something he doesn’t like. Thor eats the spicy curry I’m fond of that makes Steve’s eyes water and has Clint ordering out for pizza and makes Tony force me to cook him a portion with extra cream so it isn’t as hot. Thor eats the weird Russian stews that Natasha cooks up, half-remembered recipes from her childhood that she won’t tell us the ingredients of. He devours the strong liquors and eccentric desserts Tony feeds him as experiments, and the bizarre concoctions Clint comes up with to test this strange ability of Thor’s. He eats Agent Hill’s disastrous casseroles when the rest of us (including Hill herself) decide we’ll get takeout somewhere instead. Pepper sends someone grocery shopping every two days because we’re always out of food, not usually all of it at once but missing several key ingredients, like jars of chunky peanut butter for Steve or strawberries for Natasha or fancy Italian meats for Tony’s sandwiches. Thor eats and drinks and talks with his mouthful, but he is rarely happier than when sharing stories around a dinner table.

***

Tony Stark is a man of many scents. It all works in layers. Up top is the smell of expensive cologne and expensive scotch and expensive suits, of designer luggage and pricey upholstery and goose-down beds, of high-class travel and someone’s perfume from the night before. He smells, on this level, like the billionaire he is – it fits him like the well-tailored suits he wears and the custom shoes he orders from Italy, France, wherever.

Beneath that is the smell of metal, of singed hair and dried blood, and of coffee and sweat and the soap he uses for his skin and his hair because he is a man who takes quick showers so he doesn’t have to waste his precious time. It’s the detergent Pepper has his clothes washed with or the lingering smell of his favorite dry cleaner’s. It’s oil and rocket fuel and silicon, and it’s acid and dust and a thousand other things. It’s the smell of inventor and scientist, of engineer at work and genius at play.

And under it all is what ties it together. It is just, at his very core, Tony – a smell that can’t be defined, because it isn’t like anything else. It is everything and nothing at once. It is rich and heady and it lingers for too long after he’s left a room.. It’s what’s left when Tony takes off the fancy suits, leaves the garage or the workshop, washes off the smell of a day’s work and a night’s play and just stops for one second and lets himself just be. It’s the scent that means everyone is home, the one that means comfort and acceptance and teasing patience and all the things that Tony does for us every single day that he doesn’t even realize he does. It calms us and excites us, it soothes and yearns, and it’s the smell that fills my nose and lungs when he leans over my shoulder to examine the experiment we’ve been working all day on, when he’s close to you like he always wants to be and you don’t push him away because he’s your best friend and everything is alright when he’s there. It is warm. It is alive. It is friendship. And it is Tony.

With Tony, everything is touch. It was hard to get used to at first, his constant prodding and brushing and brotherly shoving and shaking and grasping and patting, especially because I was never used to that sort of thing even before my accident and even less after it. But Tony put his hands on everything. He knows every tool by touch, he strokes each robot lovingly after it completes his tasks, he flips through papers he has no intention of reading and memorizes the feeling of devices he has every intention of scrapping. When he reads he flips unconsciously through the pages between his fingers, and when he sits still for too long he starts playing with his hair or the hem of his shirt or his carefully manicured fingernails. Sometimes Tony doesn’t speak in words, but in gestures and small touches and in silent, warm, close-pressed human contact. He talks with his hands and his whole body, each movement speaking volumes to the thoughts that linger beneath the collected exterior. He’s told me that when he was still getting used to the arc reactor his hand would stray to it, to feel the scars and the smooth glass under his shirt, to feel its glowing warmth in a place where previously there had been only smooth skin over muscle and bone - though now it has become such a part of him that it lays forgotten until Pepper runs her fingers over it, and I’m still not used to it even though I’ve never known Tony without it.

Tony is every bit the genius he is known to be. He is the smartest person I’ve ever met – he outstrips me by far, though he insists that he doesn’t (a first for Tony, since as a rule he considers himself smarter than everyone else without exception). But what Tony is not is the heartless weapons manufacturer, the cold and distanced playboy, the bitter alcoholic, or the cocky hero in the suit of armor. What Tony really is is a person who feels everything, however much he pretends he doesn’t. He learned when he was very young that if he couldn’t laugh at himself, at others, at everything in the world, then it would crush him. So he makes up nicknames, he plays little tricks, he winds people up and annoys them and pushes things a little too far sometimes because it gives him the strength to push against the things that threaten to bury him alive at every second. Though I learned it later, put it on like a second skin to protect myself, I do the same thing – I make jokes about the Other Guy because it makes it easier for people to laugh as well if you tell them it’s okay, and I’m less frustrated and less angry when people aren’t as afraid of me. Tony makes it all possible. He’s the best friend I could have asked for, and the first I’ve had in a long time. Tony is a shield from the world, a buffer between his friends and the awful things the world tries to make them put up with. Tony is confidence and charisma and sheer force of will, and he doesn’t let anything get in his way for very long. He’s an engine driving us all, and we’re exactly the fuel he needs.

***

We all live together, in Stark Tower, which Tony renamed Avengers Tower in a rare absence of egotism, but that name never stuck and every now and then there’s a hint of the sense that really we’re all Tony’s guests. Tony and Stark Industries provide everything. Tony pays for our food and our laundry and all the damages we incur; he gave each of us our own private apartments and he gave me a lab of my own. We live freely on Tony’s expense and at the behest of SHIELD, and we’re all in one place and we’ve learned to live together after a long while butting heads and making mistakes and destroying Tony’s possessions.

I spend all my time with Tony in his various labs and workshops, testing and experimenting and discovering. When he isn’t on missions for SHIELD Clint is always around, though you never quite know where – he could be hiding in an air duct or just around a corner, waiting for you and watching you and listening. Steve spends a lot of time in the gym and with Bucky the dog, because he exercises out his frustrations at the world he still doesn’t quite feel a part of, and when he’s not there he’s watching over all of us, visiting Tony and I in the lab, talking with Clint and Natasha, or wrestling or playing games or eating and drinking with Thor. Natasha keeps to herself a lot, though every now and then she’ll spend an hour watching Tony and I at work, or she’ll cook a meal, and she’ll show up to a training session – that is, when she isn’t out on business for SHIELD. Thor putters around, training and playing and every now and then he’ll visit Asgard, always returning with huge stories and news of his father and mother, Loki, Sif, and the Warriors Three. When Tony isn’t being dragged to board meetings and red carpet appearances he spends time in his penthouse relaxing or spending time with Pepper or with me in the workshop, inventing and modifying and fooling around with expensive equipment.

It was hard at first, to get used to our shared spaces. With Thor eating all our food and our enormous personal space issues and our myriad other defects, we butted heads constantly. We were like the strangest roommates, who couldn’t agree on anything. But gradually we understood each other’s idiosyncrasies. We knew when Tony was in a sour mood by the set of his shoulders and his unkempt hair. We wouldn’t see Natasha for days on end. Clint would shoot objects out of our hands when he was feeling frustrated and cooped up. Thor broke everything, sometimes through his unavoidable hulking clumsiness and sometimes because he simply didn’t know the limits of his own strength. Steve mothered us all, believing it his job to keep the place running, and this chafed at Tony and Natasha especially. They all learned not to be as afraid of me, but they also learned which kinds of silence meant stay away and which were the regular, benign kinds.

It became seamless, effortless, after a while. The others’ natures became our second natures, and we knew what to expect. After months of training together, eating together, fighting together, laughing together, and being together, we understand each other. It’s easy, now, to know where you stand. Our scents mingle together in our shared spaces, and it’s a unified force, a single identifiable entity that is just the Team.

There are times, after we’ve been called on to defend the earth from yet another threat, after we’ve all washed and dressed our wounds and eaten where we gather in one room, and it’s just quiet. Usually when we’re all in one room it’s to discuss training schedules or to eat a meal or to work out some problem, but after a fight it is the blessed quiet we all need with the sort of brothers-in-arms feeling that has brought us together. We pull the couches close and sprawl over them. I sit tucked in a corner, with Tony’s head on my lap and Tony’s feet on Steve’s knees, Natasha curled under one of Clint’s arms and Thor flat on his back. Inevitably we fall asleep, a warm huddle of hero, and not a single person – not Pepper or Hill or Fury – ever interrupts it. Because they know that we’ve seen things together that they haven’t, and sometimes we need time to be alone with our thoughts together.

We became the team Fury wanted us to be. We’re misfits, different from one another in a lot of ways but similar in too many others. We’re a team; we’re an efficient and flowing machine. We’re there for each other. We’re the Avengers, but we are more than that – we’re a family.

**Author's Note:**

> Well, I hope you enjoyed it! The theme, obviously, was the senses. Each of the Avengers had their own "patron" sense, if you will. (Bruce - smell, Natasha - hearing, Steve - time (yes, it's a sense, there _are_ more than 5), SHIELD - proprioception, Clint - sight, Thor - taste, and Tony - touch. If you want to get really into it, you could say the Avengers as a team are nociception, or the sense of pain.)


End file.
